Taught by Time
by NPYD
Summary: [Future AU. Sequel to 'A friend in New York.'] Today is day three hundred and sixty six. This is what she wanted. #CastleThemeDay entry.


_A sequel to "If you want a friend in New York." Won't make a ton of sense without that one, and possibly not even with._

* * *

It's cold. The sleep slides from her eyes and they learn to focus again, facing the window, her breath so steady there that the frost on the outside has cleared a circle. A little porthole to the world outside.

She still wakes at 5:45 most mornings. It's a bit past 7 today, still dark. The previous night's activities must have taken something more out of her than usual - or maybe she was just too warm and comfortable to wake before now. Piecing together the distinct absence at her back and her sudden chill despite the nest of linen and flannel, movement outside catches her eye. She can just make out a black blur, lurching through the first deep snow of the season.

Kate pulls the blankets tighter around her, squirming to the side where it's still warm, slinking down until she's practically cocooned, unwilling to move. Idly, she hopes that when she's got the energy to get up and dress, Cosima's left some snow untouched for them. A muffled whistle sounds outside, bouncing off skeleton trees and the shed out back, and the black blur halts her exploration and bounds back easily through the tracks she's made.

It's been a long time coming, this day. It's what she wants. It's what she's always wanted.

When she'd agreed to stop, stormed back into his life and fell at his feet and said she'd lay down her obsessions and her life's work, it had all been okay. For a while. Deep down, Kate knew better. Her father's words from years before echoed in her mind that night she promised her husband, recalled from the time she held her father's hand after his last relapse, another brush with death chasing the apparent family curse down the neck of a bottle of gin. ' _Katie,'_ he'd said, his voice weak from a recently removed tube, ' _just 'cause you got the monkey off your back doesn't mean the circus has left town.'_

And he was right. Her vows reduced to a mouthful of empty words. The siren song of a lead was too powerful to resist. And at first, Castle thought she'd be okay. Six weeks' recovery, after all, and she'd kept her word. Hell, he'd joined her, and that had been all the license she needed to take off, chasing some shadow, some remnant of Bracken's old crew of hired guns. When it was all over, another associate of Maddox's in prison and not talking, he'd assumed that this time, it was really through.

Only, she couldn't believe it.

Off the job only on paper, she'd thrown herself back in for two straight weeks, convinced and consumed with the idea that it was still out there; that Bracken, Simmons, LockSat, everything they'd dealt with were just individual heads of some grand Medusa of a conspiracy – cut off one head and three grow back in its place. The night she packed a bag for New Mexico, following some longshot story about drug connections running through Albuquerque, he'd had enough. He fought her like never before, not with screaming or accusations, but with the same heartbroken resignation as the last time she'd left, underlined by a steely determination to not allow her to ruin both of them again, if she was still so bent on ruining herself. He'd given her a final ultimatum.

He asked her for a year. A year or they were done. A year away from everything, a year just for them. His voice choked and too high with desperation to save them both, he'd tried to joke, said that it'd be the honeymoon they never really got around to taking.

In the end, it'd been no real choice at all. Nothing was worth giving up Castle. If – back then, it hadn't seemed like an 'if'; now, it sounds… improbable at best – there was still a conspiracy at hand, let someone else take up the torch. Surely there are other brilliant crimefighters in the world who can finish the job. If not with half the style that she and Castle did it with.

Today is day three hundred and sixty six. This is what she wanted.

The irresistible call of coffee and the warmth of the fire drifts up the stairs, but she lays for a moment longer, stretching her good-sore limbs and listening to their tight house sigh and settle with the change in temperature. He's left her an old shirt under his pillow, like always, and she slips it over her head. At last, Kate finds her feet, bounds quickly down the narrow staircase, the only place in the house the fire can't warm. It's a quick descent that still leaves her feet longing for the cover of quilts, and her arms and legs prickled with gooseflesh.

She loves that flannel shirt. Blue and black and worn thin in spots, a soft buffer between her cheek and his steady heartbeat on the nights they curl up together in a single chair, reading or talking or simply enjoying each others' company. The sight of it summons an unexpected lump to her throat.

Cosima alerts him of her presence, giving a single happy yap and dancing excitedly around her, her ears flattened and her feathery tail spinning a cheery circle.

"Morning, 'Sima," she greets foggily, catching the young dog's ear in a scratch before the predictable creature returns to Castle's side, staring longingly at the pan of eggs. She saunters up too, relieved that breakfast is topped only with bits of peppers and nothing particularly unusual. The world is not and may never be ready for the smorelette, and Castle's mostly accepted it. "Morning, babe."

Not particularly chatty this morning, Castle answers with an arm hooked around her back, pulling her close and brushing his cheek on the top of her head before attending to the coffee, leaving his own with a splash of cream and performing his magic over hers. She still can't make it right. She's given up trying. The espresso machine hisses and froths, and just like that, he's closing her hands around a mug of warmth and love. The heart in the foam says so.

"Thanks," she beams up at him. Pressing a kiss to her forehead, he takes a long draught of his own as he chops the big omelette in two and slides half onto one plate, half onto the other.

"Ah," he speaks at last, "good morning."

Silence descends over their scrubbed wooden table, punctuated only by the clang of forks and picking up and setting down their mugs. Kate's eyes fixate anywhere but the tear-away calendar by the door, directly behind Castle's head. It's still on December 18th. The riddle of the day is still asking what walks on four feet in the morning, two in the afternoon and three at night. They never had resolved that little bickering match, where she'd recalled forced readings of Oedipus in high school for the obvious answer, while he'd launched into an extensive explanation of a deconstruction he'd read in a decidedly less classical text once, and posed that the Sphinx could be defeated by the illogic of its own riddle, something to do with time and ageing to seventy on a 24-hour cycle. Petulantly, Kate had argued that it was the spirit of the answer rather than the details, but in any case, he'd been sufficiently distracted from any further dispute shortly thereafter.

Maybe if they never answered it – they musn't have, the paper's still there - it's still the 18th.

The first month, she'd been okay. It was like Castle said: the honeymoon they never took. A break from their regular lives. She'd delighted in the quiet, low-key Christmas, when the whole of their tiny patchwork family had packed into the small rental home. She'd enjoyed the fresh air, the slower pace of life afforded to Shiloh. And then cabin fever set in. She began counting the days until she could go home, longing for the buzz of the city, the 24-hour Chinese delivery, the familiar faces, the breakneck pace of work that allowed her to outrun her demons, if only for a little while.

She'd bought the riddle calendar and stuck it by the door back in February, relishing the tear of each page that marked another day off her sentence. By May, she'd accepted her fate, found things to do and enjoy, to bide her time. She and Castle went back to fighting crime – of sorts. Small town life far upstate was hardly a hotbed of murderers and conspiracies. But as the only husband and wife P.I. team in the region, they found plenty of work investigating cheating spouses, corrupt local council elections, and even uncovered a branch of the Red Hat Society fronting an embezzlement scheme.

Their morning routine hums by and both of them studiously ignore the incomplete ritual of the calendar.

Dressing warmly, she lets Castle help her lace up her boots, laughing and squirming when his fingers find the back of her knees, ticklish even through the weight of her jeans.

"Knock it off," she admonishes. "We'll never leave the house if you keep that up."

When she realizes what she's said, moments after he's obeyed and his back is turned, she allows herself an indulgent kick to her own shin. It's not like she can feel it much with the snow boots, but it's satisfying just the same.

Outside, the snow's coming fast. It scared her the first time, just days after they arrived, watching their familiar trees seemingly shrink under feet of snow, knowing that there were no city services to come plow the road clear for them, that if power got knocked out, she had no idea how to use a generator. It looked like an alien landscape; she imagined a world post-apocalypse where they were the only two people left, the untouched landscape so seemingly devoid of life, save for a then-much-smaller Cosima.

The farm collie's path, just shy of two hours old, is half buried already. It's not so unfamiliar now. Signs of life are everywhere, just hidden, she finds, if only she knows where to look. Kate takes off running, enjoying the crunch of powder beneath the tread of her boots, the bite of the air and the rosiness blossoming in her cheeks and nose in response. Castle follows, his arm wrapping her from behind before he jams a hat on her head, sparing her ears at least, and then giving her a playful shove and wandering off to find his own fresh snow to ruin at the perimeter of her sight.

Their hole-in-the-wall office in town is closed up, the friends they've made bid goodbye. Most of their pared-down possessions are in boxes. They have little to do this morning, and play is high on the priority list. With her arms stuck out, Kate runs in varying sizes circles, messing up the snow and laughing when Cosima dogs her, barking and trying to herd her back into more predictable behavior. She turns and seizes the dog's catlike front paws when she jumps, dusting the snow off of her fur and briefly dancing with her companion before letting her down on sight of Castle, trudging a path towards them.

"Look!" he calls, the boom of his voice softened by the steady fall, "over there!"

Following his direction, she spots a carefully cleared message in the snow. KB + RC. She'd always wanted to carve that into a tree here, but it was too late now. She weasels under his arm, grinning up at him and his goofy knit beanie, courtesy of Alexis.

"It's perfect," she praises.

"What'd you do?"

"Uhhh…" she struggles for a plausible explanation as he spins them around to look at her half of the clearing, covered in haphazard footsteps of woman and dog, "well… no, I got nothing. It's just running." She'll remember to write him something next time, whenever they manage to find snow again that isn't worn and grey and strewn with the detritus of the city.

He kisses her for it anyway, smiling and nudging Cosima out of the way with his foot when she jumps on them, wanting in on the attention. His tongue winds a promise around hers, warming her up more than any layer of clothing ever could, and their arms and foggy breaths entwine until they're both covered in a thin layer of powder and the dog's taken off in pursuit of a crow.

"Guess we should pack our pajamas and blankets," he says solemnly, when they finally break.

It's what she wants. She should be ready. But unbidden, a prickle of fear overtakes her. What if she can't handle being back in the city? The temptation to fall back into her old job, or some facsimile of it, looms over her even here, faded and easily defeated, but never completely vanquished. How much worse will it be when they return? She briefly imagines her father trying to stay sober whilst bartending at the Old Haunt.

"And that pan," she adds in, nodding along.

Are not the prodigals supposed to come home?

"And Cosima's bed."

"And her squeaky penguin."

"Heaven forbid we forget that," her husband laughs, the sound not quite matching his eyes, though he whistles for Cosima again and starts them back toward the door just the same, pausing under the overhang above the door to brush their coats off before crossing the threshold.

They have a good life here. They no longer spend each night recovering – physically or emotionally – from the day. It's not a terrible flight to the city for visits, not so far that holidays can't be spent with family. They've had a year with no near-death experiences, no guns fired at them, no need for maintenance visits with Dr. Burke to cope with their jobs. It's been enough time for her to get better, for them to repair the broken things they never talked about before and get to know each other outside the context of life and death, insulated in this little snowglobe world that lacks the sharp edges of skyscrapers and constant peril. But here they are, leaving it all for what they left behind in the first place.

"You ready to go home?" Castle visibly braces for the answer.

It's what she wanted. She is not happy.

"Aren't we already?" Kate heart quickens, waiting for his reaction, praying that he'll understand and forgive her this change of heart, and her months of paying lip service to her excitement about leaving.

The corners of his eyes crinkle and she plucks off her glove, reaching up to tuck an escaped and now frozen lock of his hair back into his hat.

"I don't know," Castle wheedles, his spreading grin betraying his happiness. "It's almost Christmas, right? And Kate, I don't see a tree in the window." They hadn't bothered to decorate.

She can hardly contain herself, flying into his arms as best as the bulk of their clothes allows.

"Well, then," she toes off her boots and leaves them out, even though she knows better now, "maybe it's time we go see what we can salvage from the lot. And unpack those Christmas lights."

Castle shoos Cosima inside and shuck off their coats to fall at the floor. Seizing her shoulder, he spins her around, mouth descending on hers feverishly and melting her with remembrance of a promise once made that wasn't strong enough, and a new one that is. He pins her to the door, jarring from her a laugh into his lips when it slams closed at her back.

"Later."

* * *

 _Happy #CastleThemeDay (theme: fluff). Turned out more flangst than straight fluff but I hope it satisfies, especially those who wanted a follow up to how Kate copes with following through on leaving that part of her life. And a reminder that I do not answer to, nor will I post, any guest reviews spewing hate about the show, characters, actors, writers, or other fic writers, so try somewhere else. Or, you know, grow up and get a life._


End file.
